The Antwerp World Diamond Center in Belgium is surrounded with restricted security that makes it look like a fortress of guarded castle. The streets around it are closed with concrete barriers, and surveillance cameras are deployed everywhere to spot pedestrians’ movements. No one can enter this center without his identity card.
According to Karen Rentmeesters, spokesperson to the Antwerp World Diamond Center, the reason behind these restricted security measures is simple, as diamonds worth $220 million pass daily by this building.
Brought by buyers and merchants, this quantity of diamonds enter the center as raw stones, then leave it after being refined and cut.
The huge amount of work that takes place in this center has made it among the top diamond industry centers worldwide. Like gold, diamond becomes attractive for investors when the stock market sees regression.
The so-called Rapaport index points out that the diamond carat steadily increased between 2008 and 2011.
During this time, indices of global shares such as Dow Jones in New York, and DAX in Frankfurt dropped driven by the world financial crisis and concerns from more public debt in the United States and Europe.
Amid indices’ plunge in the global stock market in February, diamond’s prices slightly rose.
In fact, diamond’s prices tend to be more stable than gold prices. Jörg Lindemann, managing director of the Germany’s federal association of the gemstone and diamond industry (BVED) says “gemstones maintain their value.”
Over the few past years, Lindemann realized an increased interest in diamond. But the German expert advises investors to stay careful, adding that “to invest in diamond, you have to understand the market more deeply…individual investors often don’t understand the market enough.”
While the price of gold is usually determined based on weight, the value of any diamond is determined based on four factors, known as the “4Cs”: Carat, Clarity, Color, and Cut.
Diamond pieces differ notably from each other, so it is hard to compare them.
The global diamond trade is controlled by an operation known as the “Kimberley Process”, a documentation system that gives each diamond a certificate that determine its origin. This process aims at preventing the exploitation of diamonds in funding wars, and civil conflicts in stone-producing countries, and encountering the illicit trade of this gemstone, which its revenues are being used to fund criminal activities around the world.
However, critics like Michael Gibb from Global Witness says that the Kimberley Process cannot be completely trusted, adding that it’s hard to determine the “bloody diamond”, which is usually produced and exploited in regions suffering from wars and conflicts, like in some African countries.
Gibb believes that determining the “bloody diamond” and banning its trade is a very narrow perspective when it comes to dealing with a case of global trade that also includes the prevention of workers exploitation, money whitening, tax evasion, and pollution associated with the production and refinement of diamond.
At the same time, diamond production is not limited to mines; this stone is being produced in industries since the fifties.
In 2017, a German Physicist and his team at the University of Augsburg managed to produce a 155-carat diamond, one of the biggest industrial diamond in the world. Although industrial diamond is less attractive for investors and stone lovers, it is much more luring for industrial fields, especially for the manufacturers of high-end electronic devices.
The industrial diamond has the same features of natural one, but, it is 25% cheaper. Yet, differences between the industrial and natural diamond cannot be detected without a lab test. Many global institutions such as the Gemological Institute of America document diamond pieces with special certificates.
Unlike industrial diamond, getting new quantities of natural diamond has become more difficult. Rentmeesters says that building a mine take between 10 and 15 years, and the past 10 years have seen modest reserves of raw diamonds, noting that most of current diamond mines are about to close.
Rentmeesters expects interest in colored diamond to increase, and the prices of yellow, blue, and rose diamonds have actually jumped.
However, investors still face a big problem: how would they trust investing their money in diamond they don’t buy or examine directly?
One of the answers can be found in Singapore Diamond Investment Exchange (SDiX), which says that it is the first market that allows online trading of diamonds. It deals with standard diamonds, however, this eventually remains a matter of trust.
In a time, investors had financial products they can use to indirectly speculate in the future value of diamond. However, these products have vanished from markets.
Lindemann says that diamonds is not a mean for fast gain, it is more “like investing in paintings and valuable artifacts”.
